Ice cream, Insta-art and the colour of money

By Lissa Christopher

In mid-2016, the Museum of Ice Cream opened in New York. By the time the Manhattan pop-up show closed 45 days later, 300,000 people had marvelled at its pink-tiled rooms, sprinkle pools and quirky, themed displays. Another 200,000 languished on the waiting list.

The show is now in San Francisco and Miami, but if you haven't already grabbed your timed ticket, you're out of luck - it's already sold out.

Going bananas: The Ice Cream Museum has become a pink-hued mecca for Instagrammers.

The San Jose Mercury's Angela Hill memorably described the museum as being "like Willy Wonka married Mary Kay in Victoria's Secret, moved to a house on a Candyland game board and adopted the Pink Panther, My Little Pony and Hello Kitty as pets".

The "museum" is unashamedly designed to attract the selfie-obsessed generation.

It's just one of a new breed of hashtag-friendly pop-ups and galleries in the US, including Washington DC's Artechouse and 29 Rooms, a "multi-sensory playground" in New York and Los Angeles.

Successful? Undoubtedly. Fun? Apparently. But is it art?

A visitor to Carriageworks grabs the inevitable image

We've yet to see explicit Insta-art exhibitions here, but it's hard not to notice the upsurge in Sydney of colourful, immersive shows that just beg to be photographed. Shows like the Museum of Contemporary Art's current blockbuster, Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean that will finally close its doors later this month after a hugely popular run which also attracted many first-time visitors.

"Herds of young people" have been approaching the ticket desk, holding up their phones to display Instagram photos of a Rist work titled Pixelwald Motherboard, and asking where they can find "the light show", 22-year-old MCA host Cody Heathcote-Heller says.

Pixelwald Motherboard is a video work featuring 3000 LED lights. It's a complex piece of art and also a very sparkly one.

It has been such a hot spot for "elaborate selfies", says Heathcote-Heller, that at peak times staff have had to politely encourage some snappers to move on.

Instagram and its crowd-pulling power was not a deliberate consideration when Sip My Ocean was programmed, MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor says, but that's not to say it won't be in future programming decisions, particularly around the not-for-profit's summer exhibitions, which are a vital source of funding and publicity.

There is, however, a caveat. "You have to choose artwork because it's important to show not just because it's going to look great on Instagram," McGregor says.

"If Instagram can be used as a key to get people through the door, then it does a great job for us," Macgregor says. Even if visitors come in primarily to see something "big, splashy, evocative" (read: Instagrammable), she says, they also tend to roam all over the building where they will inevitably encounter complex artworks with little or no Instagram appeal.

Emma White's Untitled (useless, powerful)I 2008, a powerboard made of polymer clay, is probably the least Instagrammed piece in the MCA collection, Heathcote-Heller says. It's also his personal favourite.

Over at Carriageworks in Redfern, Katharina Grosse's vast, multi-hued installation, The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres Then It Stopped, has been the subject of thousands of smartphone pictures since it opened last month.

"[Grosse's installation] is an incredible piece of contemporary art and I hope people will share it [on Instagram] like crazy," Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah says. "But we would never program or create work with an artist thinking about how it would work in an Instagram context.

"I think that if you are true to the ambition of the artist and delivering ambitious projects, [the Instagram effect] will emerge naturally … You can't make it happen. You have to let it happen."

McGregor is aware some of the young Instagrammers visiting the MCA are engaging more with their own images than the art, but she remains optimistic.

"I do think if people are just taking selfies, that is concerning, but then again, why not? Not everybody is going to engage with an artwork on the same level.

"And Instagram isn't just selfies. It's becoming a photography movement, if you like. I think it's very exciting because it's taking things in a new direction. Young people are being very creative, not just sticking their own face in, but attempting to make a really great image out of an artwork."

Havilah also refuses to bag out the selfie takers she sees at Carriageworks.

"I see it all the time and I love it," she says. "I love when people use our space to document their lives. The more that happens, the more Carriageworks is embedded in people's memories and lives."